


Love, Betty...and Jughead

by loveleee



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: A little bit of pining, Christmas, F/M, a little bit of fake dating, a little bit of misunderstandings, a little bit of roommates, a lot of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:28:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28243941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveleee/pseuds/loveleee
Summary: “What’s all this?”“Christmas cards.” Betty slips one into a green envelope, and her tongue darts out to lick the adhesive edge. Jughead feels his pulse speed up, and takes it as his cue to move past her into the kitchen.“I thought only old people sent those.” Jughead pops open a tin sitting on the kitchen counter, and grabs four gingerbread cookies. One of the many benefits to living with Betty Cooper during the holidays: she starts baking as soon as the Thanksgiving leftovers are gone.(Betty and Jughead send a few Christmas cards together. It leads to some misunderstandings. AU.)
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 37
Kudos: 159
Collections: 8th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	Love, Betty...and Jughead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ArsenicPanda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArsenicPanda/gifts).



> @arsenicpanda prompted me: _37 or 45 + bughead_ from a winter prompts list.
> 
> 37: you jokingly suggest we send out holiday cards together as friends so we do, and now everyone is congratulating us for finally getting together
> 
> 45: your family ditches you for the holiday so i take you home with me, except my family thinks we’re dating now, and i don’t know how to tell them that we’re not

It all starts on a Wednesday evening in early December.

Jughead emerges from his bedroom, bleary-eyed after a three-hour writing streak, to find Betty seated on the floor behind their coffee table with a pen in hand and a stack of red and gold greeting cards at her elbow. An episode of _The Great British Baking Show_ that he’s pretty sure they’ve already watched together plays on the tv. (If they haven’t, he’s gonna be pissed she kept going without him.)

“What’s all this?”

“Christmas cards.” Betty slips one into a green envelope, and her tongue darts out to lick the adhesive edge. Jughead feels his pulse speed up, and takes it as his cue to move past her into the kitchen.

“I thought only old people sent those.” Jughead pops open a tin sitting on the kitchen counter, and grabs four gingerbread cookies. One of the many benefits to living with Betty Cooper during the holidays: she starts baking as soon as the Thanksgiving leftovers are gone.

“My mother engrained it in me.”

Jughead rejoins her in the living room. Wordlessly, he hands her one of the gingerbread cookies – a reindeer, or maybe a horse with really misshapen ears – and settles down onto the floor beside her. This close, he can detect the faint scent of her woodsy winter perfume, and for a fleeting moment he imagines burying his face in the crook of her neck, how soft her skin might feel under his lips.

He takes an aggressive chomp of his tree-shaped cookie. _Not the right time, Jughead._ Not that there ever is one.

Eager for a distraction, he peers curiously at the card she’s writing, and does a double take. “You’re sending one to my family?”

Betty bites off her cookie’s head, finishing the word _Jellybean_ with a flourish of her pen. “They’re taking me in for Christmas, of course they get a card.”

To her surprise and dismay, Betty’s own family would be scattered to the four winds this year. Not all of it was a surprise: the “farm collective” where her sister Polly lived with her boyfriend didn’t celebrate Christmas, and it would be her father’s first year spending the day with his new wife and stepdaughter down in North Carolina. He had asked Betty to join them, but after her last visit had ended with her fourteen-year-old stepsister filling Betty’s shampoo bottle with depilatory cream, she had declined the invitation.

Her mother, Alice, had been the real wild card. Usually Betty could count on a quiet week at home in Riverdale, in a house filled to the brim with garland and red ribbons, smelling like a cookie factory thanks to the scented diffusers her mother kept plugged in 24/7.

This year, however, Alice had announced in mid-October that she’d be joining one of her divorcee friends on a holiday singles cruise to St. Lucia. “You’re welcome to join us, Elizabeth,” she’d said. Betty had also declined this invitation, given that she was not, as she put it, in the market for a divorced father of two in his mid-fifties.

While Jughead knew that Betty’s feelings towards her mother were complicated at best, he also knew that it must hurt to be completely abandoned by your own family at Christmastime, and so he’d called his own mother that same night to see if they could accommodate one more guest during his brief sojourn to Toledo.

Gladys Jones had sighed – the four of them would be a tight fit in the two-bedroom apartment she shared with Jughead’s sister – but agreed to the plan. “We’ll make it work.”

Crumbs fall from his mouth and onto the coffee table as Jughead reads the short, sweet message she’s written on the card. Under Betty’s glare, he swipes the crumbs into his palm, neatly depositing them on a napkin to be discarded later. “Put my name on it, too.”

Betty’s mouth quirks up at the side. “You want credit for _my_ card?”

“Yes. Otherwise the whole time we’re home I’ll have to listen to my mom talk about how thoughtful you are while her own lazy son couldn’t be bothered.” He plucks the pen from her grasp, scribbling _\+ Jughead_ beneath Betty’s signature.

She laughs, and pushes the pile of green envelopes closer to him. “Fine. But you have to do the envelopes.”

Jughead watches as she checks _Jones family_ off of her list. “Add me on for Archie and Veronica, too,” he says. “Oh, and definitely Fred. And Pop. Not Ethel – well, no, I guess Ethel’s fine, if it’s from both of us –”

“ _Jughead_.” Betty elbows him in the arm. “You can sign, but you’re going to have to contribute more than just your name.”

He grumbles, but ultimately acquiesces, adding a line or two of his own to each of the cards. _The Great British Baking Show_ rolls on, and by the end of the night they have a stack of neatly addressed envelopes to drop in the mailbox around the corner, which Betty does the next morning. Jughead promptly forgets all about the Christmas cards.

Until two weeks later, when Gladys welcomes them into her apartment with a tight hug and immediately says, “I am so glad you two finally got together.”

Jughead freezes in the doorway, but before he can really react, she barrels on. “I didn’t know _how_ we were going to find a space for everyone to fit. I thought maybe the girls could bunk up together, but Jelly’s room looks like Chernobyl, no one deserves to be subjected to that. But you two should fit just fine on the pull-out. No pun intended.”

Jughead cringes, but Gladys either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. She waves towards the coat stand by the door. “Take your jackets off, stay awhile. You want something to drink?”

Jughead swallows hard. _What the…?_ “Uh, Mom –”

He yelps as Betty stomps on his foot.

“I’d love some tea, if you have it. It’s cold out there,” Betty says loudly. She leans up towards his ear and says in a low, warning voice that hits him right in the gut: _“Jughead.”_

Okay. For whatever reason, Betty wants to go with this – so he’ll go with it. Even though, as far as he’s concerned, there is absolutely no logical explanation for why his mother has suddenly decided that he’s now dating his childhood friend and roommate of the last three years.

And what did she mean by _finally_?

Betty and Jughead peel off their outer layers as Gladys peppers them with questions from the kitchen. They’re mostly innocuous – how was the drive, has it snowed yet in New York, do they have any plans for New Year’s – and by the time their scarves are hung by the door, she has two steaming, mismatched mugs of tea waiting for them on the tiny kitchen table. Jughead’s is black and says _Fuck You_ with no further context, which admittedly, is very on-brand for the Jones family. Betty’s appears to be stolen from a local pizza place.

Betty fills Gladys in on the latest gossip Alice Cooper had fed her from Riverdale – some scandal involving Reggie Mantle’s dad and a secret shell company – while Jughead zones out, letting his gaze drift around the kitchen. Something on the fridge catches his eye: a red-and-gold Christmas card.

He sits up straighter in his seat. Oh. _Oh._

His mind conjures up an image of the text message he’d received from Archie about a week ago. _Congrats bro! Happy for you guys_ , it read. Jughead had just assumed that Betty had for some reason told Archie about their recent success in renewing their lease without a hike in rent, and wrote back _thanks_ without request for further clarification.

He’d also received an indecipherable string of emojis from Veronica that morning, but that was nothing new. He’d sent her a thumbs up, to which she replied with an eyeroll.

Until now, he hadn’t seen the text messages as connected in any way – but around the same time, Ethel Muggs had unfollowed him on Instagram. (Not that he _cared_. But he only had twenty followers to begin with. And Ethel was kind of obsessed with him. So it caught his notice.) 

As he now realizes: this confluence of non-events had all occurred at the exact moment when Betty and Jughead’s dual-signed Christmas cards would have been reaching their recipients in the mail.

Jughead starts to laugh.

Betty and Gladys pause their conversation to stare at him. Betty touches his elbow, concerned. “Are you okay?”

Jughead leans back in his chair, fully relaxed now that he has an explanation for everything. (Well – everything except the fact that Betty was playing along with it.) “Never been better.”

Gladys and Betty exchange a look, and then Gladys stands up from the table. “I’ve got to go pick up your sister from her thing. How about we pick up a pizza on the way back?”

“Sounds great, Mom.” Jughead waves at her cheerily on her way out the door.

Now alone, Betty nudges his ankle with her foot beneath the table. “What’s going on?”

He points to the card on the fridge. “My mom thinks we’re together because we co-signed a Christmas card. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

Rather than join in on the laughter, Betty’s cheeks turn a deep shade of pink. “Oh. Yeah, Veronica and Archie actually thought the same thing.”

Jughead sits up again, wrapping both hands around his mug. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugs, avoiding his gaze. “I don’t know – I told them nothing changed. It didn’t really seem like a big deal.”

She sounds…disappointed, almost. But that doesn’t make any sense. “So why aren’t we telling my mom the same thing?”

Betty looks at him with wide eyes. “You heard how relieved she was that she didn’t have to find a place for me to sleep. I didn’t want to send her into a tailspin.”

“My mom doesn’t tailspin.” Jughead raises an eyebrow. “ _Your_ mom tailspins.”

“Well, mom habits die hard.” She picks at the handle of her mug, a chip of paint flaking off the ceramic. Betty seems flustered, and it makes him feel flustered, too. _What is going on here?_

He has known for years now that he has a crush on Betty. It had only clicked after they’d been living together for a few months – he wouldn’t have agreed to be her roommate otherwise – but he’s become more than adept at suppressing those feelings. Betty does something cute? Smile and walk away. Betty smells good? Go eat something that smells better.

He’s never dared to imagine that _she_ might have a crush on him, too. But despite its sheer improbability, it would do a pretty decent job of explaining whatever it is that’s happening between them right now.

“So that’s it?” he asks lightly. “You want to pretend we’re dating for the next four days just to appease my mom?”

She gives him a murderous glare, and then buries her face in her arms against the table. “Jughead.”

Summoning all of his courage, he sets his mug aside, and rests his fingertips on her shoulder. “Betty.”

Peering up at him from the cradle of her arms, she seems to make a decision. In one swift motion, Betty leans up and kisses him.

It’s only a brief kiss – hardly more than a peck, really. So, without really thinking about it, Jughead cups her face in his hands, and pulls her back for another.

_Much better._

Her lips are soft, and she tastes faintly of chamomile. Jughead feels like he could melt into her, were it not for the cheap Ikea table between them.

When she pulls away, she keeps her eyes closed, a small smile playing at her lips. “No,” she admits, her voice soft and breathy. “I don’t want to _pretend_ we’re dating.”

“Good.” She opens her eyes again, and Jughead smiles, tugging her chair closer to his. Their knees press together. Her hand lands on his thigh. “Neither do I.”

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in like, 2 hours, and barely edited. Hopefully it is not riddled with errors.
> 
> is this the lamest fic title ever? I think it might be, in a good way.
> 
> I hope very much that you enjoy this, that you'll leave a comment if you do, and most of all, that you have a wonderful holiday this year! <3


End file.
